Right Angle began as a column in the now-defunct Sunday magazine in November 1991. The column allowed me the luxury of presenting an alternative to the prevailing left-liberal consensus in India. It has become the implicit signature tune for all my subsequent writings.

Sunday, April 08, 2012

The centre cannot hold

By Swapan Dasgupta

It is easy for historians, writing with the benefit
of hindsight, to identify the roots of developments that subsequently evolve
into a ‘crisis’. For contemporaries, however, long-term trends are more
difficult to detect, and in the Made in Media age the inclination to equate
individual trees for the wood is often irresistible.

In 2004, prior to a general election it imagined was
already won, the BJP projected itself as the “natural party of government” and
targeted 300 Lok Sabha seats. Today, after a long bout of incoherence stemming
from unending factional battles, it faces the ignominy of being dubbed the Big
Joke Party by a reputable international publication.

In 2009, the Congress emerged from an election few expected
would yield a clear outcome, with a tally of 206 seats. The 2009 verdict
convinced the party leadership it was on a comeback trail—one that would fulfil
its grand dream of governing India with a clear majority of its own. Today,
after a series of humiliating election defeats, it is shell shocked and
blundering from one crisis to another.

For the commentariat, the two parallel developments
signal the ‘crisis’ of the national parties, with no clear indication of what
is to come in its place. For the parties, however, dejection hasn’t triggered soul
searching. The Congress still believes that with Rahul Gandhi as its mascot, a
bagful of mega welfare schemes and the magic of secularism, it will somehow crawl
back to power again. After all, assert Congress loyalists cockily, the nation
is always bigger than the sum of all its states.

An equally smug BJP believes that a
generously-funded campaign centred on anti-incumbency will allow the NDA to be
in a position to attract post-poll allies and cross the hump. The saffron
generals aren’t needlessly bothered by their lack of a big idea, their
inability to attract new talent, their wariness of their star leader from
Gujarat and the sleaze factor within. In a two horse race, they believe, their
pony will outpace the injured Congress stallion.

It is possible that either of these scenarios will
play out in the summer of 2012 or even earlier. But that doesn’t negate the
fact that both pan-Indian parties are in deep crisis for reasons they have not
been able to yet comprehend.

Since the Crown replaced the Company in 1858, India
has been taught to believe that a strong Centre is a precondition to peace and
prosperity. A firm but benign dispensation in Delhi has been projected as the maa-baap sarkar. Earlier, this system of
paternalism offered peremptory justice, famine relief and protection from
thugees and marauders. Today, blessed with bewildering acronyms, it also promises
100 days of work, subsidised foodgrain and other ‘entitlements’. On the face of
it, Incredible India has remained Timeless India—interspersed with Bollywood,
cricket and mobile phones. Or at least that’s the caricature the babalogs fondly
believe as they navigate their SUVs into their constituencies. The rule is simple: smart casual in Delhi and meeting ka kapda—as a venerable Bengali
barrister politician called it—in the boon docks.

But amid the timelessness, something else is also
happenings. In just two decades, India has witnessed more encapsulated growth
(albeit uneven) than the past century taken together. Prosperity, education,
information, mobility and rising expectations have changed the Indian mentality
profoundly. There is an air of impatience which has translated into a greater
concern for the quality of life, not in abstraction, but in their localities. A
strengthened democracy is witnessing a relative disinterest in the nation and a
greater identification with the regions. Patriotism hasn’t eroded, but among
the rising elites and local notables there is unconcern and indifference to
Delhi.

This is what happened in the US, as prosperity
strengthened localism. The phenomenon is being replicated in India. What is a
‘crisis’ today is waiting to become an opportunity.

There is a
constituency anxious to express its exasperation with the remote control of the
metropolitan elite. With their high commands and controlled leadership
structures, the national parties are living in a make-believe Beltway. They
have a choice: to either reshape themselves into loose coalitions of state
interests or live out their unitarian fantasies in irrelevance.

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About Me

The Right is an endangered community in India's English-language media. I happen to be one of the few to have retained a precarious toehold in the mainstream media. I intend this blog as a sounding board of ideas and concerns.
You can read the details of my education, professional experience and political inclinations on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swapan_Dasgupta).
RIGHT ANGLE is an archive of my published articles. USUAL SUSPECTS is my blog.